Man fires pepper spray on Westboro Baptist Church outside Marine's funeral

A motorist fired pepper spray Saturday at a group of demonstrators and counter-protesters outside a funeral for a U.S. Marine in Omaha, Nebraska, police said.

The incident occurred shortly before 10 a.m. (11 a.m. ET) as members of a small Kansas church that protests at military funerals and counter-protesters stood nearly a block away from First United Methodist Church during services for Staff Sgt. Michael Bock, 26, who died August 13 in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

I think we can all agree that all of the active members of Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church are horrible, horrible people.

With that said, there are a couple comments attached to this article–and comments like this are pretty common–saying that if more people did what this guy did, maybe Phelps and co. would stop the protesting and the hate.

No. A million times no. You can’t win against this sort of hate. These people–a large family, primarily–will never stop until they live out their lives and die. Good riddance…but it’ll be years from now.

What this man did–he missed, for one thing–is only going to strengthen their conviction. The fact that he missed makes it even worse: I guarantee that the WBC now believes that God shielded them from the pepper spray. If he hadn’t missed? “God is testing us and our will is only stronger now.” Or some such bullshit.

Also? The man who tried to pepper spray them? “He’s a fag lover.”

Now he’s going to get fined (or maybe even jail time) for doing something that was never going to make a bit of difference. I hope he really enjoys his 15 minutes of folk hero status, or the high he got from making the attempt.

I’ve said this before, but it needs to be said more often: If everyone who now “hates” the Westboro Baptist Church because they’re targeting military funerals had expressed the same level of derision towards the group back when they were primarily targeting “faggots” and “liberal universities” with the same level of vitriol–I’d have more sympathy for the current anti-Phelps crowd. It still wouldn’t have made a difference, but I’d at least feel like their outrage was based on hating Phelps’s message, rather than hating that he’s directing it (now) at someone they actually care about.

Why is the funeral of a soldier worse than the funeral of a gay man? Of someone who died of aids? Why did the “soldier factor” prompt people to seek legislation that would have disallowed hateful protests JUST near the funerals of soldiers? Why the special exemption? Setting aside the free-speech issue (which is a big issue to set aside) aren’t all lives precious and worth standing up for? Or, do we for whatever reason place more value on soldiers than on “citizen faggots”?

Fuck that and fuck you if you think that.